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Preposterous Plans, Nora Clauson

Preposterous Plans

Sir: May I take this opportunity to plead with Gov. Harold LeVander and our esteemed legislators to remember their positions of responsibility and leadership — and drop their preposterous plans for a private fishing resort at the Capitol?

It was hinted in your news article that plans included re-routing traffic thru the Mt. Airy district to provide “peace and quiet” around the Capitol Approach.

May I suggest that Mt. Airy and other low-income areas in this city have absorbed far more than their share of traffic already and the time has come to say enough!

Mt. Airy is already bordered by a freeway, as is McDonough Housing. I-94 races thru the Dale-Selby area, and if that were not enough, it has been proposed that schools be built above the freeway to “conserve air-space.” If proposed plans by the State Highway Commission are approved Roosevelt Housing, too will be bordered by a freeway. As things now stand, it is bordered by heavily-trafficked Maryland Avenue, cut into by Ames Avenue, and residents have been told that stop signs, “slow-children” signs or lower speed limits would only increase accidents. (Yet the number of preschoolers concentrated here is almost as great as the number of school age children in any local school, and it has never been suggested that “slow-children” signs be removed from school approaches.

This combined with a Public Housing policy that forbids individual tenants to erect fences, would almost lead one to believe that the “powers that be” have hit upon an effective means of population control — if that were not too nightmarish to believe.

If we must plant trees, and build trout streams — why not as a buffer zone between these inner-city neighborhoods and the freeways that zoom by them? Make it an Arbor Day project and let the kids do the work! Or maybe a grove of pines around St. Paul – Ramsey Hospital to deaden the din.

But let’s keep traffic flowing by the Capitol, if only to keep our legislators aware of this city’s problems.